Le Cœur qui syncope
by LesMisLoony
Summary: In the year 1810, stranger comes to Montreuil-sur-Mer. A local urchin called Fantine finds herself caught up in an adventure that will both shape and ruin her life.
1. Chapter 1

_Je suis une femme, mi-lune mi-homme_  
_Une anagramme, un erratum_  
_On me dessine, on me façonne_  
_Je vous fascine, ça vous étonne..._

* * *

It has been said that I had no parents, that I sprang up from the streets like a nymph in the mist, but this is nonsense. A mortal babe could not survive without the intervention of adults, and I can assure you that I am as mortal as anyone. Those poets who saw me running barefoot through the streets of my childhood must have used my image to build a fantasy, but they did so without seeking knowledge of my history, making use of the idea of me rather than acknowledging the truth of a human life.

Indeed, I had parents, and though they were gone when I was yet very young, I heard enough stories from the innkeeper who raised me to summon a memory that may not have been my own: the features faded over time, but the auburn-haired woman with the white smile in my mind's eye matched Servane's description well enough to convince me that it was my mother.

My mother, I am told, was born in Paris, that great city which is the heart of our country and our history. She was still young when the fighting began: as Servane tells it, she had been married hardly a fortnight, and had yet to unpack most of her dresses in her new townhouse when the soldiers dragged her husband away to the guillotine. Like so many others, he was condemned not for blood spilled by his hand, but by the blood that ran peacefully through his veins.

My mother traded frocks with a kitchen maid and fled Paris, passing the walls at the bottom of a cart laden with rotting food on its way to a trash heap to the north of the city. She was discovered by the driver and left on the side of the road there, where she had no choice but to continue on foot, nothing in her pockets but one of the maid's handkerchiefs, her common dress stained and stinking.

Servane will not tell me what happened on my mother's journey; I only know that she came at last into Montreuil-sur-Mer some years later, a very different creature to the wide-eyed bride who had had the presence of mind to escape a city under attack by its own inhabitants. Whatever cunning she had had at that time had blossomed on the road out of necessity, and Servane says that that is all I need know.

What I do know is that the thought of England, a country free of peasant revolts, was what bore my mother onward, and that a journey that should have lasted less than a week stretched over nearly a decade. I also know that when she arrived at last in this little town near the sea, so close to her destination, my life had begun inside her.

The inn that I could have called my home is located on the southern road, just near the outskirts of Montreuil-sur-Mer. On the first year of the new century Servane's grandmother commissioned a heavy wooden sign that portrays a shadowy battle scene and, behind it, the walls of the city thrown into relief against a sunrise. The name of the inn is scrawled across the black ramparts in white lettering, or so she tells me. The old woman died soon after the new sign was in place, and the inn fell to Servane's management. It was in that year that my mother arrived, and on her first night in the inn Servane caught her trying make off with another guest's luggage. They were of an age, Servane tells me, and somehow through this encounter the two became friends.

Though I thought of the inn as my home during my childhood, I have recently encountered bewildered gazes upon describing my daily routine. I was allowed to sleep on the hearth before the fire if I was willing to assist Servane with her duties, and if I washed the dishes I could eat any scraps left on a guest's plate. Servane was kind, but she was not my family and did not seek to become it.

Sometimes, when she had had too much brandy, Servane would motion for me to sit at her feet and, eyes red with drink and tears, she would tell me in a low, raspy voice that she let me stay on because my mother had given her life for mine. When I was a child, her stories left me believing that a babe cannot be born lest she suck away her mother's life and take it as her own, for this is what I did when I came into the world. I was born on the very hearth where I slept, and when my mother expired, so too did the one person Servane had cherished.

I don't remember her fostering me, or teaching me to speak and walk. I am not sure that she did. My earliest visions are of the narrow streets of Montreuil-sur-Mer disappearing beneath my bare feet, the flesh of my toes so covered with dirt that they matched the ground beneath them. I assembled my own clothes from castoff scraps, and in the summer I slept wherever I had been standing when I first choked back a yawn. I kept to myself through it all, making wide arcs around groups of children my age. It is with no self-pity that I say that I had no friends. I sought none and needed none. When I played, it was alone. My own imagination was my treasured companion, and I was never bored.

Servane must have been in her thirties at the time, and though she was a small, thin woman, to me she was a giant. I do not think she loved me, though sometimes I would catch her staring at my face with a strange intensity. I must have resembled my mother, though I had no looking-glass to see what this might mean. I knew that my hair was blonde because it refused to be contained by the strings with which I occasionally attempted to bind it, and always fell into my eyes. As for the rest of my appearance, I could only vouch for what I saw above my earth-stained feet. I did not work so hard that my skin chafed, and I did not eat enough to hide the shape of my ribs.

I fell once from a great height. I hardly remember the circumstances now, though I think I had climbed into a tree to investigate a bird's nest. I remember the sound of a twig snapping and a feeling of pure terror as I lost my grip, then the shuddering crash as I landed on the rocky ground below and a sensation that my lungs had closed forever. When at last I was able to draw breath I tried to stand and discovered that I had broken an arm; I got myself as far as the road before I fainted at the pain.

I remember regaining consciousness the way a log floats to the surface of a murky pond, and I remember seeing the changes in the sky each time I opened my eyes. A child though I was, I remember the moment I realized that I would die soon, and the gift of my mother's life would be wasted.

I don't know how much time passed in that way, but at last a shadow fell over me and I recognized the familiar face of Servane. Clucking her tongue and muttering irritably, she wrapped me in a blanket that had been draped over her arm and carried me home. It was the only time I ever saw her leave the grounds of the inn. She laid me on a table that evening and found a doctor amongst the guests who was willing to tend to me without charge. He wrenched the bones of my arm into alignment and bound them that way.

Servane did not look at me for weeks following the injury, but there was a plate of food on the hearth each evening, and I daresay I have never eaten better than I did during my convalescence. The moment I was healed, everything went back to normal without another word about any of it.

I shall never know whether Servane came to fetch me that day out of a reluctant affection for me or through a sense of duty toward the mother who had borne me, but I suspect it was the latter. Though my mother and I never met, and though I was brought up on charity rather than in a family, I never felt homeless.

Throughout it all, Servane never spoke my mother's name. She only called me "_Enfant_", and over the years that became Fantine.


	2. Chapter 2

Tweaked my timeline a little bit. Shh, don't tell. Also I realized where this was going and bumped up the rating. I'll probably have to bump it up again later.

* * *

In 1806, Monsieur Gagnier fell in his orchard, and, having less luck than I had had several years before, died of his wounds. Because he and his wife had often provided food for the inn, Servane sent me to the Gagnier farm to help. I heard her tell the farmer's widow that I was ten years old.

Madame Gagnier was a surly woman with broad shoulders and a serious set to her mouth who took on her husband's outdoor jobs with ease while her elderly sister oversaw the household. When I first arrived, I only ran between them with meals in baskets, but then I learned to help Mademoiselle Duchamps with the sewing, for her eyesight did not allow it, and branched out to other household chores as the old woman's faculties eroded away. The widow Gagnier only took slightly more notice of me than she did the horses, but I was given my own pallet in the attic and a permanent place at the table. As I stared up at the dusty beams each night from my place on the floor, I thanked the God to whom I had heard strangers pray for my good fortune.

As Mademoiselle Duchamps's age advanced, she began to lose some of her wits and mistake me for a daughter - whether to herself or her sister, I could not say. She would hobble along the house a step behind me, pushing herself forward with a tall wooden cane as gnarled as her thin fingers, and good-naturedly rap the stick against my shins if I erred in any of our shared duties.

It was old Mademoiselle Duchamps who taught me that I needed to mind my appearance. She bundled me in her own dresses until I realized for the first time that I needed to protect my bare flesh from something more ominous than the cold breeze off the sea. In the evenings she would sit before the fire, swaddled in quilts, and I would work on taking in the seams of her dresses to fit her withering body as she spun horrible tales of the dangers of handsome young men. Even now, the weight of a young man's gaze on my back evokes the sound of a rustling fire and the rasping voice of Mademoiselle Duchamps. Beauty, she would tell me, attracts handsome young men the way a henhouse attracts foxes: all good women must protect themselves from attack, for a young man, like a fox, will find a way in if there is but the slightest gap in the fence, and he will destroy everything inside.

I was bringing a basket of goods to Servane at the inn one day when she commented on the state of my dress. I was wearing a simple white frock with long sleeves and an ankle-length skirt, a yellowing fichu tied around my neck like a shawl. It was normal to wear dresses with high collars in Mademoiselle Duchamps's presence, so I had never before considered how drastic a change these formalities must make from the half-wild creature with the tangled hair who had drifted around this very room on chubby bare legs. When I explained that the garments had been a gift from Madame Gagnier's spinster sister, Servane had rolled her eyes and nodded as though that information answered a question she had not asked. It wasn't until months later that she told me that Mademoiselle Duchamps had been engaged once in her youth, but had fallen pregnant some time before the wedding was arranged. The suitor had disappeared at the news, and the unwanted baby was never born.

This knowledge did not change the effect her preaching had on my views of the world; in fact, it proved her right.

After four peaceful years in the service of the sisters, Mademoiselle Duchamps died and Madame Gagnier sold the farm and remarried an aging politician who lived near the city center. I hung about until the last of the livestock were gone, but the new family had three strong young sons; even if they had needed my hands, I dared not linger in their presence after what I had been taught. I took up a suitcase full of Mademoiselle Duchamps's old clothes and moved back to the inn.

I had grown. At the age of fourteen it was no longer suitable for me to curl up at the hearth that had been my childhood home, and I had grown unused to sleeping on the ground. As Servane had no extra bed for me, I took to sleeping in the loft above the stables, plucking straw from my long hair each morning before I arranged it atop my head in the same simple knot I had done daily for Mademoiselle Duchamps after her fingers were too twisted to do it herself.

I was very nearly a young woman by then, and life at the inn chafed. I took long trips on foot to neighboring farms, but no one had need of a girl's help and none would take me on. For the first time in my life, a knot of dread haunted my thoughts as I began to realize that Montreuil-sur-Mer would no longer support me. I did not know where to go next. I could not imagine a life that was not shadowed by the city's walls.

I was fifteen when the strange girl came to the inn with the answer.

The night I met the stranger who would change my life, I was seated on a stool before the fire, my pale green dress tucked carefully around my ankles lest a fragment of my stockings peek out, with a basket full of mending at my side. Servane had let it be known that I was skilled with a needle, and patrons of the inn often slipped me a few coins in exchange for a quick patch job on this or that travel-weary garment. I was repinning the ragged hem on a quilted petticoat when I heard a sharp, wry voice say, "Well, there's a curious face for a spinster!"

I looked up and immediately felt a blush spread across my cheeks when I caught the speaker's eye.

She seemed a woman grown, though I know now that she was only three years older than me. She had dark olive skin and long, black hair that was only partially done up atop her head, most of it falling loose to her waist. If this was indecent, she was heedless of it. The neck of her dress was not quite low enough to be daring, but it was enough to make me avert my eyes to her knee, where she bounced a babe with curly black hair who could only have been hers. The child gurgled happily at me, its black eyes winking, and I could not help but smile at it.

"His name is Djemz," the mother seemed to say; it took me a moment to realize that she had said the English name "James." My expression must have been quizzical, for a corner of her mouth tucked up into a smirk and she explained, "The name was a gift from his father. I have been in England, you know."

Something in her laughing gaze scoured the bare flesh of my face. I nodded, flustered, and tucked my chin against my collar, trying hard to focus on my sewing despite the weight of her presence.

But the black-haired stranger had not finished with me. "And where are you from?" she asked. I felt like her voice cut smoothly through the chatter of the other guests, though in fact she was sitting at the table nearest my stool and it is doubtful that the others even heard.

I shook my head without lifting my eyes. "Here."

"That very hearth?" the girl asked sarcastically. "What, were you born in front of that fire?"

I nodded.

"Oh," said the girl, letting the acidity seep out of her voice. "Really?"

I nodded again, jabbing my finger with the needle and watching with chagrin as a spot of blood stained the tattered petticoat.

"Would you at least look at me?" snapped the stranger. "You're being very rude. I'm trying to converse with you"

Embarrassed, I slid my needle into the damaged petticoat and folded it carefully, returning it to the basket. "I'm sorry. I'm unused to conversation."

"Oh, speak up," she huffed.

I lifted my head then, and folded my hands in my lap as I returned her gaze. I had hoped to keep my expression empty, but I felt the heat of my cheeks and knew that she could tell she had flustered me.

To my surprise, her smile was genuine now. "Is that little innkeeper your mother?" she asked, jerking her chin toward the kitchen. I could hear Servane on the other side of the door, grumbling into a pot of stew.

"My mother died when I was born," I answered, unable to keep eye contact with the stranger and looking instead at the child in her lap. A long string of spittle had slipped from his gap-toothed mouth and was threatening to drop from his chin to his dress.

The girl nodded sympathetically. "It's not an easy passage." She ruffled a hand through her infant's black curls. "Is it, James?" she asked, her voice going falsetto. The child smiled widely, and the string of spittle snapped, leaving a dark spatter on the rose-colored gown. He burbled happily in reply.

I returned the child's smile, and he let out a shriek of laughter that his mother shushed under a few idle glares from the other patrons.

"So you're an orphan who was born in this inn and never left, is that it?" the girl asked me. "What do they call you, then?"

"Fantine."

She snorted. "Aimée. I'm going back to Paris, where I was born. My husband was studying at the university there when we met, and he took me back to Surrey to marry me."

"My congratulations," I said humbly, noting how pale the child's skin was compared to his mother's. I cast a subtle glance around the inn, but saw no one who might have been his father.

"Oh, enough of that," she grumbled. Her dark eyes traveled up and down my body then, a probing cunning in them that made me cross my arms across my stomach. "I suppose, dressed like that, you haven't got a sweetheart?"

Wordless again, I could only shrug, feeling the heat blossom over my cheeks again. I was not blind to the way women allowed young men to court them, but that whole sphere of life seemed foreign and stressful. I had no idea how to enter it, and once I walked among them I would have no idea how to conduct myself. The best option was to remain where I was comfortable, walking the familiar floors of Servane's inn.

"You needn't put on such airs, Fantine," the stranger said, impatient. "We're all women here, lest you fear my James."

The infant shrieked giddily at the sound of his name, prompting a giggle from his mother Aimée and a few hisses from others around the room.

"Have you any pressing business this evening, little Fantine?" Aimée asked conspiratorially. When I shook my head, she shifted the child to her hip and stood in a swift, easy motion. "Then would you be so good as to accompany me to my room as I put my child to bed? I admit I'm starved for female company. Since I left Paris I've had naught but my husband and his awful scholar friends to amuse me."

I agreed, and followed her up the stairs, the infant grinning at me over her shoulder the entire time.

It was true that I was not accustomed to conversation at that age: Servane was terse at best, Madame Gagnier had barely spared a grunt for me in the space of four years, and Mademoiselle Duchamps liked nothing more than to launch into fragmented speeches punctuated by half-remembered anecdotes that required little participation from the listener. I had always preferred to reflect rather than project, content to simply absorb others' words and opinions instead of forming my own. I was a blissful shadow of a creature then, accepting the ideas that were passed along to me as unquestioningly as I accepted scraps of food. I have never been one to argue or protest my fate. When Aimée told me to come with her, I followed obediently.

Servane's inn was not large; most of the travelers who passed through Montreuil-sur-Mer on their way to England preferred to continue on to Calais before nightfall, so she never had more than a handful of guests sleeping under her roof on a given night. Aimée led me up the second flight of stairs to the upper floor, where a long row of tiny garret rooms were meant to be reserved for a few servants, and which Servane sometimes rented to guests with smaller purses as a courtesy.

Aimée was staying in the chamber nearest the stairs. It was a cramped room with cracked plaster walls and a wide bed covering most of the floor. Atop a chest of drawers that had been backed into a corner was a battered basket filled with blankets; this was where Aimée put her baby James. I caught sight of a heavy suitcase pushed beneath the bed, part of a trouser leg emerging where it had been improperly closed. It must have been the property of her Englishman.

Aimée gestured toward the bed, so I obediently sat at the edge and watched as she fussed with the baby, scraping the dried spittle from his face and congratulating him on the cleanliness of his dress. I waited for her to take notice of me again, watching as her dark hair caught the last of the day's light from the tiny window above the bed. I didn't quite dare sink into the straw mattress, so I braced myself at its edge, forcing my spine to remain straight lest I looked like I was taking advantage of her hospitality.

It did not take long for the infant to settle into his basket, his shouts of laughter winding down to occasional sighs. Aimée waited until he was quiet before she turned away and slumped her shoulders with a histrionic groan of relief. "I'm afraid I can't recommend motherhood," she said good-naturedly, "unless you've a household full of nursemaids and servants to keep you afloat. I don't know how anyone does this, especially with more than one child!" She threw herself onto the mattress next to me, kicking off her shoes. "But you're in no danger of motherhood, are you, Enfantine?" she laughed. "You're still a child yourself! Tell me, has no one ever tried courting the spinster urchin of Montreuil-sur-Mer?"

I couldn't help but smile at the epithet. "I'm afraid I don't travel in the right circles for such things."

She groaned and seized me by the sleeve, tugging me backwards until I gave up on respecting her space and let her pull me down next to her. I turned onto my stomach, propping my chin in my hands, while Aimée remained on her back. She was watching me with a warm smile; her teeth seemed very white against her dark skin. "You're beautiful, little one," she said. "Haven't men been telling you as much for years?"

I shook my head; my cheeks were growing warm again.

"They will. It won't be long until you'll have to shove through a crowd of suitors every time you leave the door!" Aimée proclaimed.

After Mademoiselle Duchamps's stories, the image her words evoked was horrific. A shiver worked its way up my spine like the touch of unwelcome fingers.

Aimée noticed. "Someone has thoroughly poisoned your thoughts, little spinster! You should bask in the adoration of men!" she laughed, stretching languidly across the mattress. "After all, it can really pay off, if you know how to use it. Especially with a pale little creature like you as bait. They'd try to pass you off as a proper lady. You'd be feted and pampered and wrapped in the finest clothes if you let the right man claim you."

I shook my head again, opening my hands so that I was peering at her through my fingers.

"In time, then," she ceded. "Who taught you to be so afraid, little Enfantine?"

"A woman who is dead." I went into no further detail; it didn't seem right to evoke the ghosts that had haunted Mademoiselle Duchamps when she herself had been laid to rest.

"Seems like she meant bring you into the grave with her!"

I glanced toward the door as I wondered why she had brought me here; Aimée noticed this too. She rolled onto her side and threw an arm around my shoulders. "Forgive me, sweet Fantine! I am as unused to conversation as you! I never left the house in Surrey, you know. And I speak very little English, so I had no one but my husband for company - and my James, when he was born."

"Perhaps I should let you rest until morning," I ventured. "We can speak again after we've had some sleep."

But when I started to pull away, she tightened her grip on my shoulders and all the bravado dropped from her expression.

"Madame?"

"Please, Fantine," she murmured, her voice grave. "Could you stay here for the night?"

I searched her face, but there was no hint of insincerity in her round black eyes: I could have sworn I even saw a shadow of something darker than worry lingering there. "Madame?" I said again.

"Please," she repeated. "My husband- my husband went out and hasn't returned. I don't like- I'm _afraid_ of staying here alone. Please."

What else could I do?

When Aimée saw that I would agree, everything about her relaxed; as she stripped down to her shift and crawled beneath the blankets she chattered away about her friends in Paris who would be delighted at her return. I wasn't listening, focused instead on what I should do if her husband were to return in the middle of the night and find me in his place, and whether I should take off my dress in front of this stranger or sleep fully clothed.

In the end it made no difference. I kept the green dress and laid rigidly beneath the sheets, forcing myself to occupy as little space as possible while I stared up at the sloped ceiling; Aimée, meanwhile, hugged the pillow beneath her head and continued to prattle blithely until she drifted off to sleep mid-sentence.

It was the first night I had ever spent in a bed, and despite the comfort of it, I could not sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

Aimée did not release me from her friendship the following day, nor the day after. In fact, I was her acolyte for the full week of her stay at Servane's inn. She often left little James with me and ventured empty-handed into the town; each time she returned, disheveled, she had a few coins clutched in her hand.

The child took an immediate liking to me, though I daresay he was a good-natured enough creature that his wet smile was bestowed on anyone who took a moment to coo over him or complement his china-white skin and thick, silky curls. In all the hours that he was in my care he never howled like some patrons' babes; instead, his wide black eyes would fill with tears and he would turn the most pitiful expression on me, his rosy lips trembling, until I acquiesced and fed him. Aimée witnessed this once and laughed, telling me her child, like his mother, already knew how best to get what he wanted from others.

Before Aimée came to the inn I had hardly spent any time with women my age, much less borne the responsibility of upholding a new human life. Yet Aimée had trusted me completely with the safety of her child the first time she went off alone. I had hardly dared move him from my lap for the first hour, until I smelled that he had soiled himself and carried him delicately across the garret room to the washbasin. He squirmed so much beneath my hands that I was forced to tighten my grip, realizing then that his bones, though small, were not as brittle as I had imagined. By the third day of Aimée's stay at the inn, I was unafraid to carry the child down to my stool before the hearth and sit with him on one knee, letting the patrons dote on him and, occasionally, on me. The attention of those who thought me a mother was the most surprising revelation of all: I had never been looked at with respect until baby James was in my arms. I knew that motherhood created a meaningful bond between the parent and her child-sometimes even after her death, as in my case-but I'd never considered that playing the role of a devoted wife and mother might raise my own status in the eyes of others. With James on my knee, I wasn't just the spinster urchin of Montreuil-sur-Mer, but a woman. It was a status I had never considered reaching, nor had I been aware that I lacked it.

Aimée and I proved to be surprisingly good companions for one another. She loved nothing more than to regale me with stories about her life-she had a way of spinning even mundane daily events into an entertaining tale, her expressive face and voice injecting humor in unlikely places-and I in turn loved nothing more than to listen. Though she was only eighteen, Aimée had already lived more stories than even old Mademoiselle Duchamps. I learned about her wretched mother, a servant who had caught the eye of a gentleman one day when she had accidentally exposed part of her leg to him, and how she had left her daughter to raise herself when she was hardly old enough to stand. She knew little of her father, but she invented a hoary professor with eyes that rolled freely in their sockets and a mouth that was twisted into an eternal snarl. Seeing her contort her face as she described him always sent me into fits of undignified hysterics.

The images that held my attention the most were her descriptions of Paris, the city of her birth. In stories about my mother, Servane had always described it as a war-torn place full of intrigue and murderous traitors, but in Aimée's eyes, it was a noble city with elegant limestone buildings and hulking palaces lining a broad, slow river that was dotted with all manner of barges. She described a city with winding streets choked with well-dressed people and peaceful carriages, of neighbors calling happily to each other from upper windows and cafés filled with lively students who spent more time eyeing women than books. I had grown up on the edge of Montreuil-sur-Mer and thought it a big city, but Aimée opened up the rest of the world for me. She described Paris; she had traveled; she had known companionship and employment and true, complete homelessness.

It was not hard to see why Aimée persisted in calling me "Enfantine".

I noticed at once that my new friend-for indeed, I had finally dared to think of her as such-only spoke of Paris, of companions she had left behind, and of lovers with whom she had parted ways. The story of James's father and her life in England remained untold. The subject, like the suitcase crammed beneath the bed, was closed and mostly hidden.

I did not ask. I never asked. When the story of Mademoiselle Duchamps and her broken engagement had reached my ears, I had turned away from it and buried it. I knew the old woman as she presented herself. The person she had once been was irrelevant.

It was the same with Aimée: she was my first real friend, a passionate, open woman with an easy laugh and an expressive face. I only sought to identify her as my friend, as the woman who was staying in a garret room at Servane's inn and who insisted I stay with her. The stories of her childhood in Paris were interesting only because they presented a new view of the famous city; I did not think they had anything to do with our friendship. Nor did I wonder about James's father and the life Aimée had led in England.

I was young then, and I was foolish. It was not the first time I would ignore blatant warning signs about the person in whom I had put my trust, and I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't the last time either.

At the end of the eighth day of Aimée's stay at Servane's inn, I awoke to the sound of the door being thrown open. Aimée had left for the evening and I had been charged with James; the infant had dozed off in my arms and, loathe to wake him, I had simply curled around him and fallen asleep myself. When the crooked wooden door slammed into the wall I awoke with a start. James opened his dark eyes and stared gravely at his mother, who was standing over the bed with her dark hair falling loose around her shoulders. In a sliver of starlight I saw a frantic expression on her face.

"Lie down," she hissed. "Lie back down and go to sleep. If he comes in, this is your room, do you understand? That is your child."

I nodded and obeyed, still drowsy enough to accept this turn of events as though it was a continuation of a dream. Aimée dropped out of sight, and after a moment I heard the long scrape of something being dragged across the floor. I lifted my head just enough to see her dark, unbound hair as she rifled through the suitcase that I had never dared mention. By the dim light of the moon, Aimée stripped off her dress and dragged on a men's undershirt, then stood to put on a pair of baggy trousers. She crammed her dress back into the suitcase and caught up her hair under a top hat, which fell a little too low on her brow, resting on her ears and bending them beneath its brim. To my surprise, after retrieving a vest from the suitcase she latched it and hurled it out the open window. I gasped and sat up-the window looked out onto the street, and though it was late at night I expected to hear a passerby cry out. Aimée shushed me and pushed me back onto the bed. She held me there for a moment, straining to listen against the silence of the night. I thought I heard a dog barking in the town and the eternal noise of crickets in the tall grass outside, but nothing else.

Aimée was not reassured. She began buttoning the vest and pulled a cravat from the breast pocket, which she tied with practiced ease. I was fully awake now, but the vision of my new friend dressed as a scrawny gentleman was so unexpected that I still felt disoriented.

"We have time," she whispered, "but he's downstairs. He'd see me. Give me James."

I sat up, moving away from the child so that she could scoop him into her arms and transfer him to his basket. "Take him," she said urgently, shoving him against my chest. "Don't let anyone see him. Wait for me by the road."

"What are you-?"

"He's here," she said again, her voice rising to a hiss. "Don't let him see my baby. He's downstairs. Go!"

I adjusted my grip on James's basket and, grateful that I had not changed out of my dress before falling asleep, stepped into my slippers and went out into the narrow hall, but we had delayed too long. The bottom stair creaked beneath an intruder's weight; the wooden rail whispered beneath someone's palm. I backed into the room again. "Aimée?"

She shushed me, but it was too late. At the sound of my voice the boots on the staircase broke into a run. Unsure what to do, I took the baby into the furthest corner from the door and dropped to a crouch, hunching my shoulders and letting my loose hair fall forward in an effort to hide the child from the intruder's sight. Aimée had not told me from whom we were hiding, but the emergence of the suitcase full of men's clothes had been explanation enough.

A moment later, James's father was standing in the doorway.

I must admit I was surprised. He was a small man with narrow shoulders-I realized then why the men's clothes from the suitcase fit Aimée so well-and a curly crop of hair that glowed bright orange in the dim light from the open window. His skin was as white as his son's, but covered in splatters of freckles. Despite his charming complexion, the man's expression was frightening.

"Amy!" he shouted, his voice thinner than I expected. His pale eyes roamed across the room and came to rest on me. He said something else in English; I could only gape at him uselessly. "I know she's here," he said in heavily accented French, advancing on me as I huddled over his child.

I shook my head, unsure if Aimée had meant for me to lie to him. She had spoken to me a moment ago, but now I realized that I didn't see her in the cramped room. Had she thrown herself out of the window after the suitcase and left me to face her Englishman alone?

In a few strides he was upon me, his face now a dark shade of red that clashed with his hair. At the time I thought him a man grown, but in my memory I realize that he was only a few years older than the mother of his child. Here was one of the creatures about whom old Mademoiselle Duchamps had warned me: a thin, graceful young man with blackness in his heart and a cowering woman before him. I may have been afraid, but I was not surprised.

The Englishman caught my chin between his fingers and forced my head back, glaring into my eyes. He said something else I couldn't understand when he realized what was in my lap, twisting my hair roughly out of the way. As he leaned over the basket, pushing me against the wall, I heard little James shriek for the first time since I had met him, an angry howl that was almost inhuman.

Then, an instant later, the Englishman was wrenched over backward, the glow of a white sleeve wrapped around his neck. Aimée had reemerged and was practically hanging from the man's back, both arms wrapped tightly around his neck. He spluttered, prying futilely at her wrists, and for a moment I thought she would succeed. Then the Englishman bent forward, hoisting Amy partially off the ground, and took two off-balance steps backward, ramming her into the doorway and collapsing against her with his own weight. I heard her sharp intake of air as she slipped to the floor, trying to regain the use of her lungs. The Englishman stood up, adjusting his collar and clearing his throat experimentally, the purple tinge of his skin fading back to white.

As for me, I could only watch the scene unfold before me the way I had listened to the horrid stories that old Mademoiselle Duchamps told before the fireplace. I hunched over James's basket again as his father approached once more, muttering something in his native tongue.

Even if I hadn't just watched this man batter my only friend against a wall, even if he had simply strolled into the inn and politely asked to hold the babe in his arms, I would not have surrendered James to him. This child had been in my care for the better part of a week, and I had already come to know his moods and expressions. He had smiled at me once, and when I put my hand into his basket he grasped at my fingers and laughed. I adored the child, perhaps even more than I did his mother, and would not have passed him to a stranger for any price.

My thoughts were scrambled as the Englishman advanced on me; I told myself that I could put the basket aside and leap upon him once he was close enough, that I could drag him to the ground as Aimée had done and crush at his throat with my elbow. I steeled myself as he rose an arm, perhaps to strike me, but before he had the chance Aimée was between us again, and she landed a blow directly in the middle of his face.

Blood burst from beneath her fist, and the Englishman crumpled backward on the floor, his jaw lolling.

Aimée seized my shoulder with her clean hand and barked, "Go, get up, now! Outside!"

I obeyed after stealing another glance at the unconscious Englishman: he finely-shaped nose was misaligned and his face was covered in a half-mask of blood. A dark pool of the stuff was even forming under his head like a pillow; I noticed that he had collided with the corner of the doorframe as he fell. I dared not linger. I leapt over the Englishman's oustretched legs, clutching James's basket to my chest, and thundered down the wooden stairs of Servane's inn, aware that Aimée was just behind though I dared not turn my head. We cleared the upper hallway and second staircase in an instant. The front room of the inn had never seemed to small as I left it behind and made for the road. A moment later Aimée was at my side, her battered suitcase swinging in one fist and her blood-covered hand balled against her stomach. "The coach to Paris," she gasped at me. "You can leave us at the coach!"

I had not run freely down the streets of Montfermeil since going to live at the Gagnier farm, but it seemed that none of my stamina had deserted me over the years. The tall grass was a blur as I moved through it, only the steady drum of my feet against the ground and my ragged heartbeat filling my thoughts.

I didn't stop until Aimée tripped and seized me by the arm in an attempt to catch herself; I had the presence of mind to fall on one side, still curled around James's basket to protect it from the impact. For a long moment we lay next to each other as we had fallen, our chests heaving as we raggedly gasped for breath in the thin autumn air.

Even when my heart had slowed and Aimée's panting had subsided, we remained there unmoving. I stared at the star-specked night sky, my vision framed by the tall yellow grass that must have hidden us from the view of the road, one hand resting in James's basket to verify that the child, though quiet, was unharmed.

I saw the grass near my feet rise gently back into place. Our trail was gone. If the Englishman had regained consciousness and tried to follow us, he couldn't know which way we had run.

It was Aimée who spoke first, her voice as low as the chilly wind that rustled the wild grass.

"I forgot the money."

I turned my head away from the fading stars at last.

Aimée was lying flat on her back, unmoving, her dark eyes round. Her blood-stained hand was still balled against her stomach, though the blood itself had dried to a dark brown color that matched her stolen waistcoat. With her other hand, she clutched at a few strands of grass so tightly that her knuckles were white in the gloom. When I offered no answer, she turned her stricken expression on me. "The money. I had a bag of coins to pay the coach to Paris. It was all the money I had. When I packed the suitcase I forgot to add it. I left the money under the bed."

I began to understand, but I could still think of nothing to say. I had no money of my own to offer her.

"I can't make it to Paris unless I go back, but I know he'll wait till morning to pursue me. He'll still be at the inn. The disguise won't be enough."

"I'll go," I blurted.

As soon as the words had been said, an expression I had never seen before seeped into Aimée's eyes. "Enfantine," she murmured, sounding out the nickname as though we had never met.

I pushed James's basket over to her and scrambled to my feet, brushing futilely at the dirt stains on my long grey dress. There was a smear of the Englishman's blood on the sleeve where Aimée's wounded hand had brushed me during our fall, and another where she had seized my by the shoulder at the inn.

Aimée giggled, her voice ragged. "If ever you visit me in Paris, little one, I shall buy you a modern frock. No one will ever believe you were once the spinster urchin of Montreuil-sur-Mer after I've finished with you!"

"Then I shall visit you in Paris one day," I assured her with a smile.

The walk back to the inn took much longer than I expected. We had been moving fast when we made our escape, propelled by panic at the sight of the Englishman's blood. The sky behind me was streaked yellow by the time I reached the outskirts of Montreuil-sur-Mer. The lengths of chain securing the sign above Servane's inn creaked gently in the cold breeze, but other than that, everything seemed quiet. There was no sign of the Englishman.

The front room was empty. I crossed over to the hearth where I had been born and crouched over the embers, thinking to blow them to life and warm my hands before I continued upstairs.

A floorboard creaked and, still skittish after the night's events, I leapt to my feet and spun around.

It was only Servane, a battered housecoat pulled on over her shift and her greying hair hidden beneath a nightcap. I greeted her and started to turn back to the fireplace, but she stood where she was and stared at me. Her face was in shadow; I could not make out her expression.

"Did we wake you?" I asked cautiously. "When the man attacked Aimée, did we-?"

Servane turned to the kitchen and propped the door open with her back. "She's here!"

A police sergeant appeared at her shoulder with a pastry in one hand, shadowed by a soldier who could not have been much older than I was: his round face still marred by acne. I had seen the sergeant loitering on street corners for years; he was an old man with plump, low-hanging cheeks and a face encircled by a white beard like a lion's mane. He pushed the young soldier forward.

"Yes sir," the boy said, marching importantly across the floor of the room and starting to seize my arm. He balked, then called over his shoulder, "She's even got the late gentleman's blood all over her dress!"

"So don't wait! Arrest her!" the sergeant replied.

Grinning, the boy rounded on me and seized me by my other arm. "Come with me."


End file.
